The online business market is vast, there are no bounds to what can be achieved given the right approach, but many businesses unintentionally become complacent when they experience success.
Growing your online business requires you to adapt and improve your strategy and seek continuous improvement in order to stay competitive.
So, what can you do to help your online business grow?
4 growth strategy tips for online businesses
1. Optimise SEO
SEO optimisation is the lifeline for online businesses, serving as the digital equivalent of foot traffic in a bustling shopping centre. A business in a poor physical location will struggle, and the same logic applies to your online presence. Optimising SEO is the most cost-effective strategy to attract these potential customers to your site, enhancing visibility and discoverability. It also plays a crucial role when targeted customers search for your business, ensuring you appear prominently in search results. SEO solution providers such as EKM offer tools like:
- SEO Audit & Strategy
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Keyword Research
These tools can help to improve your website’s search engine rankings, attract more targeted traffic, enhance user experience, and ultimately drive business growth.
2. Personalisation
Tailoring marketing efforts such as content, communications and promotions to individual customer preferences can boost customer conversion rates, sales, and transaction value significantly.
A personalised marketing approach can also help to forge a sense of connection with customers by showing that you understand and can provide exactly what they need on your online store. With an effective ecommerce platform such as EKM you can use customer purchase data and the integrated email marketing tools to personalise emails to ensure they encourage customers to shop and ultimately drive business growth.
3. Customer service
One of the downsides to ecommerce is the lack of human interaction, in a physical store, staff are available to offer guidance, product insight and help resolve any issues customers may face. With an online store this kind of interaction isn’t possible and the issues the customers face online can often be a lot more difficult to resolve independently meaning that an alternative solution to customer service needs to be provided.
There are various ways that you can provide support for your online business such as live chats, email support and phone support but the key to them being effective depends on:
- Availability – Providing customer support that is available to customers whenever they need helps ensure that they resolve the issues they face rather than shopping elsewhere.
- Response time – Quickly addressing customer issues enhances their experience, demonstrating that the business values their time and satisfaction. Additionally, this helps avoid customers losing interest if the issue occurs prior to their purchase.
- Knowledgeable staff – Training support staff thoroughly ensures they can handle a wide range of questions and problems effectively, contributing to better problem resolution and customer trust.
By providing customer service that meets these requirements you can create a positive experience for your customers which helps to develop customer loyalty and build a strong brand reputation overall contributing to the growth of your online business.
4. Website usability
For online businesses your website is your store, so you need to consider a customer’s experience whilst browsing. To provide the best online customer experience you need to ensure that the website is customer friendly and enables them to shop in a hassle-free way. In order to provide a effortless experience, you should consider:
- Navigation – A website that has intuitive navigation encourages customers to stay on the website longer and helps customers to find what they need quickly and efficiently, which improves their experience as well as helping support sales.
- Loading Time – On average customers will only wait 8 seconds for a page to load so having fast loading times is vital to ensure that customers don’t leave your website prematurely.
- Device Compatibility – Ensuring that customers can use your website from any device is key as the source of sales in e-commerce is very diverse. In 2024, global e-commerce sales were composed of 79% from mobile, 20% from desktop and 1% from tablets.
- Website evolution – As your business grows, it’s crucial that your website continues to meet customer needs. With an ecommerce platform like EKM, you can achieve this through automatic website evolution, ensuring you retain customers and provide them with the best possible service.
Taking these key factors into consideration can help you to avoid losing the 25 percent of shoppers who usually leave an online store without buying anything because of a poor experience and establish a strong relationship with your customers.
Discover more about growth strategies for your business
Each of these factors plays a pivotal role in helping online business to grow, taking these key factors into consideration can help you to perfect the service you’re providing and ultimately support your business in achieving its growth goals.
To discover more about how you can grow your online business efficiently and cost-effectively, request a callback.
